California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD • Hacker News Board

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#101

Post by arcticbull » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

endisneigh wrote: post #16

Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock - pointless in the end. The induced demand would outweigh the benefits. States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution. Current self driving technology plus some key infrastructure changes with dedicated bus lanes and prio…

You’re correct, self driving cars are not going to reduce traffic. A car has an average of 1.5 passengers in it while driving and it spends some 95% of its time parked.

Because they’re low/single occupancy vehicles and everybody is trying to get to and from work at approximately the same time you still need to have capacity for every single person at peak time. Any temporary reduction in traffic is immediately filled up by an increase in demand.

Just look at the last 50 years of urban development of the United States and tell me adding a few more lanes it’s gonna fix anything. Lyft is basically a self driving car if you squint, and it did nothing.

Throw in a couple trains and some busses people actually want to take, and you might actually solve the problem.

I have yet to see a plausible explanation for how self-driving cars are to reduce traffic.

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#102

Post by petee » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

drno123 wrote: post #74

Kiro wrote: post #61

How times have changed since Tesla was untouchable here. What happened and why does everyone talk like they've always hated Tesla (and Elon)? Surely it's mostly the same crowd as when Tesla was loved and Elon a superstar.

Musk bought Twitter and fired 50% od the staff without Twitter crashing, which exposed how overstaffed and overpayed thise guys were

Or just how well they designed it

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#103

Post by Symmetry » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

warning26 wrote: post #25

endisneigh wrote: post #16

Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock - pointless in the end. The induced demand would outweigh the benefits. States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution. Current self driving technology plus some key infrastructure changes with dedicated bus lanes and prio…

You’re getting downvoted but you’re not necessarily wrong. I love the idea of self driving vehicles and I’m excited about them, but I harbor no illusions about them fixing traffic. The key question I would ask to self driving proponents is this - if you waved your magic wand and suddenly changed every car on the road to self driving…how would that impact traffic? At the very least traffic wouldn’t decrease . You coul…

It's complicated to say. It makes getting stuck in traffic less bad as you can do other things, so that tend to increase it. But it also means less traffic consisting of cars cruising around looking for a parking spot in places where that's an important source of traffic. So I expect it to make traffic in LA worse but traffic in New York better based on those. Ideally you'd also have more multi-modal trips, taking the train most of the way to your destination and being picked up by a self driving car when you get there. That requires infrastructure investment, though, so won't happen quickly.

The biggest change, I think, would be less need for so much parking in so many places. I don't think you could get cities all the way down to just 1 parking spot per car but we could get it down quite a ways and get it out of central business districts.

EDIT: Oh, and with regards to that study, the fraction of the time a rideshare car is going to spend driving between customers as opposed to with customers is going to scale with the fraction of people using rideshare. The more trips are rideshare the more likely it is that on completing a ride any given car will find a new rider nearby as opposed ot far away. You would have issues like daily commutes everybody is going the same direction. But in that case adding more traffic in the other direction isn't as much of a problem as the vehicle kilometers would suggest.

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#104

Post by hericium » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #61

How times have changed since Tesla was untouchable here. What happened and why does everyone talk like they've always hated Tesla (and Elon)? Surely it's mostly the same crowd as when Tesla was loved and Elon a superstar.

Did anything change? I was downvoted for calling out Musk as dangerous (...) unstable and unethical sociopath with so called "self driving" car a year ago[1] just as I was downvoted for pointinug out FSD is a myth just one day ago[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29750109

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34105214

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#105

Post by lotsofpulp » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

keyanp wrote: post #89

lotsofpulp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just means prices are not high enough. Make it $100 to travel at rush hour on a particular stretch of road, and congestion will go away very quickly.

There are societal reasons why this won’t be accepted by the public. It’s sort of analogous to allowing the rich to pay for a higher spot on an organ donor waitlist, in theory it is economically efficient but in practice it is unfair and will cause outrage. Lots of good discussion on this idea here: https://www.econtalk.org/michael-munger-on-traffic/

Yes, the political challenge of getting massive wealth redistribution passed in conjunction with public opposition to giving up the luxury of personal cars means the probability of the US ever getting its transit situation in order is very low until energy prices rise high enough to force a change.

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#106

Post by JumpCrisscross » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

endisneigh wrote: post #16

Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock - pointless in the end. The induced demand would outweigh the benefits. States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution. Current self driving technology plus some key infrastructure changes with dedicated bus lanes and prio…

> Same thing that happened pre-COVID with "ridesharing"

Fifteen minutes in an Uber is far more pleasant, productive, and I’d wager healthy, than ten minutes in gridlock. I can focus intensely on a task or thought or even take a nap.

We should also build rail. But self-driving cars look more likely to complement rail than detract from it. (One can imagine multi-modal trains, onto which self-driving cars park so their owners can enjoy privacy and a custom interior alongside the economics and eco-friendliness of rail.)

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#107

Post by fallingknife » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 3:13 PM UTC

endisneigh wrote: post #16

Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock - pointless in the end. The induced demand would outweigh the benefits. States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution. Current self driving technology plus some key infrastructure changes with dedicated bus lanes and prio…

>what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Traffic.

Why? The number of trips is governed by the demand for trips, not the supply of cars. There isn't sufficient demand for trips to put all the cars on the road all the time, or else they already would be. The inelasticity of demand for trips is right there in the data you cite.

>TNCs led to increased road congestion in terms of both intensity (by 0.9%)

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#108

Post by arcticbull » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 3:13 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #27

endisneigh wrote: post #16

Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock - pointless in the end. The induced demand would outweigh the benefits. States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution. Current self driving technology plus some key infrastructure changes with dedicated bus lanes and prio…

Tens of millions of people live in places where frequent bus service simply isn't practical. It's probably reasonable for society to make choices that overall incentivize against living in those areas, but that isn't going to change where people live anytime soon. And you can just use taxes to control any induced demand that comes from lower costs or new behaviors. The vehicles have sophisticated tracking systems and…

Adding transit makes people live around the transit - if you let them by not kneecapping them with zoning rules. All this is an emergent property of a system designed to prevent new construction.

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#109

Post by jimkleiber » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 3:13 PM UTC

endisneigh wrote: post #81

jimkleiber wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume if there were more self-driving cars, fewer people would own cars. I think more people would take Ubers, Lyfts, and other ride sharing services. So I think that could reduce the need for parking and the amount of traffic just by increasing the utilization rate of cars.

read the study I linked - what you suppose does not and has not happened in practice.

Ah ok, I'll check it out. I'm curious if self-driving Ubers would be a step change tho, or if we would observe the same thing.

Edit: because if we half self-driving cars, do we also get self-driving buses and now we can have a lot more bus routes? Is lack (or cost) of labor one thing that holds back the number of buses we have? Could we have more mini buses? Just curious how much the labor factors into the transit options we have. Maybe it doesn't that much, I don't know.

Re: California passes law banning Tesla from calling software FSD

#110

Post by dinkumthinkum » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 3:13 PM UTC

valine wrote: post #24

endisneigh wrote: post #16

Mainstream full self driving would just create massive traffic and gridlock - pointless in the end. The induced demand would outweigh the benefits. States are better off acknowledging that sprawling car dependent cities are not sustainable. High frequency busses in the interim with rail transit is the real solution. Current self driving technology plus some key infrastructure changes with dedicated bus lanes and prio…

The roads will be so gridlocked no one will drive on them anymore /s. Seriously though there are ways of reducing traffic on the roads like increased registration taxes, raising the price of tolls, gas price hikes (or equivalent dc fast charging price hikes). Gridlock won’t be a problem. DC fast charging price hikes will be especially effective at reducing robotaxi usage as unlike privately owned EVs, robotaxis will…

Your solutions if they totally resolved gridlock seem like they would sew the seeds of riots.